Track Progress. Earn Credits. Step 2: Delete the folder of the profile you want to remove. Step 3: Open regedit. Step 5: Under ProfileList navigate to their binary key. Example binary key: S Step 6: Export their binary key to a safe place. This can be your desktop or even to a flash drive for safekeeping. Step 7: Delete the binary key. ErikN May 8, at pm. Joel Maxwell Nov 5, at pm. John Dec 10, at am. David Allie May 11, at pm. At subsequent logons, the system loads the user's profile, and then other system components configure the user's environment according to the information in the profile.
In Windows 7 or later, each user profile has an associated image presented as a user tile. The image files for the default Guest and default User accounts also appear here if you have Administrator access rights. Those instances are the only times that the images are created or updated.
Therefore, there are several caveats to keep in mind when using the Temp folder location programmatically:. The user's tile is not guaranteed to be present.
Do not give "Everyone" write permissions or Full permissions as this could create a security problem. Make sure that you check the "Replace all child permissions with inheritable permissions from this object" option and then click "Apply".
This should bring up the Registry Editor. DAT reg file. This will load the new default registry settings in to the registry editor. This is the SID for that user. In a little bit we will need to find all references to that SID in the new default profile registry settings and delete them. I like to copy and paste this in to a temp text file to make it easier to search for with out needing top type it in every time.
In this step you will look for all the references to the SID found in Step 8 and delete them. If the profile you are making in to the new default came from an existing real user profile then you will look for the SID in the registry hive you opened up in Step 7 ONLY.
The system will start searching. The SID will be found in several places. The actual number key will vary from system to system. There may be more than one of the numbered keys that has the SID in it. Delete them all. In my example the SID was found in the numbered keys , , and Delete this key. This key should have been deleted in Step 8 unless you have used a real users profile for your template in which case you would leave it alone as well as all the keys found above, other wise delete it.
For me it was found in 35, and I deleted both keys. The numbers may be different for you. Delete them all unless you used and existing real profile. For me the numbers were 38, and Delete these keys.
Delete it. For me the numbers were 22, and For me the numbers it was found in were , , and , for you it may be a different number or there may be more than one numbered key it is found under. The next key with the SID found in it is in another hive, so If you used a real profile you should now be done with searching for the SID in the registry editor. You will need to look for it in another location later.
In reality you should not find this key. If it does you must have missed one earlier so delete it. After deleting this key no more keys were found in the registry or the NewDef hive with the SID in it.
You are now done searching for the SID in the registry. We will look for it again in the registry file we created in Step 5 via the export option later. This is similar to looking for the SID. For me the number key was For you it may be different and there may be more than one. The number for me was 9 for you it could be different and there could be more than one. This is where you would start your search if you had used a real profile for your template instead of at the top of the reg tree.
This key could have a different Hex number after the Volume label on your system. You need to delete this key. In your system, you may find many references to the folders in your template profile folder path that are not going to be in my system.
You will need to delete all of these references, especially any found under the NewDef hive. Failure to do so could result in folders being created and used under the template profile folder path instead of the actual users profile path which is created the first time a new user logs in.
In the case where you used an existing profile the problem could be compounded so DO NOT miss any of the references to the template user profile path found under the NewDef hive. This is a VERY critical place you need to pay attention too. In it you will find the paths for most of the default storage locations for things like the users Documents or their Music etc. We do this for computer we have frozen so that any data created by a student will be saved in the thawed area of the PC.
We do this so that a power outage or an unexpected reboot of the PC will not cause the user to have all the data they have created erased when the PC reboots to its frozen state. Failure to get the paths in this section correct can have serious consequences and can cause all kinds of data corruption and system problems.
If after you delete the template profile path and log in with a new user you find the old template profile folder path has been recreated, the problem will most likely be because one of these folder paths did not get changed or deleted. This becomes even more of a problem and a harder one to discover if you are using an existing profile for your template. To check if this mistake was made and the integrity of a default profile created from an existing one, temporarily rename the template profile folder path then log in as a new user and see if a new profile folder path base on the template folder path has been created along with the new users profile path.
Then unload the hive and delete the problem profile folder and try again. Once you have the default profile paths working you can change the name of the template profile folder back to its original name. These values MUST be deleted. The bottom line is you must delete any of these values that have your template profile path listed in their name and leave the rest.
This will save the changed made and unload the hive. This is VERY important. Do not forget to unload your hive before closing the registry editor in Step Now you need to make an adjustment to the permissions for the.
This may take a while to complete. Ignore any warnings about sub keys that can not be changed. Ignore any messages about it not being applied to some of the sub keys etc. You may now close the registry editor. Now it is time to create the last piece of the puzzle. Default registry hive. So lets open up the NewDefault.
The file is a large one, as far as a text based file is concerned. The reason for that is that I have seen it take minute instead of seconds to do some of the searching and search and replacing that we will need to do. The resultant file that I got in my example is over 5, pages and has over , words so NotePad has a hard time with it.
Word does not. After opening the NewDefault. In my example it was found in 3 places. The first place it was found is in a numbered key, In a text based. In the. Most of the time this key value is blank.
It is in the Default key value that we find the first instance of the SID. Here we want to delete the reg key and the key values under it. See the example below. The numbered keys here are , and Again we want to delete the entire key and its key values. See example below. Next we will search for the template profile folder path in the NewDefault. We are going to search for the same path we searched the registry for in Step But when we search for folder or a file paths in a.
That will change the above registry file lines to the ones shown below. So make the FaviconPath data value look like one of the following…. Do the same thing to this that was done to the last one. The next key is similar to one found in the registry we searched through in the earlier part of this guide. See below. Also, just like in Step 10, this is the place where you can, if you want to setup the users default save locations for things like their documents and their music by assigning a real path value here.
The last key value and data line of concern in the Shell Folders section in my example is as follows. On your system the last item may be different. The same concerns and problems that can occur if one of the Shell Folders paths is incorrect that were mentioned in Step 10 apply here. Use the same testing process of your default profile mentioned in Step 10 here to make sure no mistakes were made before cloning and deploying the image. Delete all the key value and Dword data lines that point to the profile path such as the one shown below and leave all the ones that point to the ProgramData folder alone.
Delete all lines that look similar to the one above and leave all the lines that look similar to the one below alone. Under this key there are several DWord key values that have the profile path in their name.
Here just like in the section above I would delete any of the ones that have the profile path in them. You may not have this key section in your system and you may have other key sections and key values with profile paths in them that I do not as many of these key are dependent on the software that you installed in your system,.
Try to use common sense and follow the principles expressed in this guide to decide if you should delete the key value or modify the data or key value name to remove the profile path. In this section I would leave the key values alone and just delete the data values assigned to them.
The new set of key value lines should look like the following. That should be all the references to the template profile path but I would do a second search from the top of the file for the path just to make sure that none were missed. I mention this because on some systems it may be hard to see the period after the slash and it is very important.
Once this is done the keys should all look like the following at the start of their name. Once you are sue that all the search and replacing is done SAVE your file.
Now we want to import the. Default registry setting in to the registry. We do that by double clicking on the NewDefaults. You will be prompted for permission to import it. You should not see any messages about some of the keys not importing. If you do double check the permissions for the. See Step 12 for more information on how to do this.
Now you want to hide the new default profile folder. This is the way Microsoft has it. Now is the time to test your new default profile. The easiest way, if you are in a domain is to test it by logging in the PC with a domain user who has never logged in to this PC before.
This is also talked about in Steps 10 and 14 along with other info on testing the new default profile. The important thing is that there must not be any folders in the profile folder area with the same name as the profile you used for your template before we reboot and log in as a new user.
Once you are sure that the template profile folder has been renamed or deleted reboot the PC and log in as a new user. Since you either renamed or deleted the template profile folder you used to create your new default profile you should NOT see any folders with that name after logging in to the system as a new user. If you do, then you missed deleting or modifying a profile path in Steps 10 or DAT registry hive, see Step 7.
Once you have loaded the hive do a search for the Template Profile path like you did in Step 10 and make any corrections you need then reboot the PC and log in as the local admin. Once you have successfully logged in and NOT had any folders recreated with the name of the template folder you can test all the settings you expect are now a part of the default profile to make sure everything is just the way you want it. If anything is not the way you want it you may need to start the process over.
Once you are sure the default profile working the way you want it you can move on to the next step which will clean up the system and prepair it for cloning or immediate use as the case may be. Now that you have your default profile working the way you want you can do a little cleaning up and your system will be ready for cloning or immediate use.
If you used a real profile for the template and had renamed to test the new default profile as recommended in the steps above you may now return it to its original name. Next you should clean out the temp folders in the new Default profile folder.
If you are not going to clone this computer you should be done. You can disable the local admin account if you want as long as there is one active account on the system with membership in local administrators group.
If you used a template user instead of a real user for you template profile you should also delete or at least disable the template user account you used to create your default profile. If you are not going to clone your PC then you are done and can deploy the unit. If you are going to clone the PC I would first un-join the domain and then rename the PC to a generic name, then image and clone it.
I know this is a long and rather detailed description of the process for controlling the default profile but after doing it a few times you will find that the actual profile cloning process can be done in about 10 to 20 minutes. I completely agree that this could easily be done but then we would not all be forced into the self-promotions like Bing I agree with you Roy. And I'm not so sure about step If I'm not mistaken, i don't think the.
We had to make sure every user got the same custom settings. Never worked importing it into the. I don't even know what this is used for. Anyways, I agree with all the complaints on here.
Microsoft's goal should be to make things easier for the admin as well as the end user. This change ONLY makes things harder for us. It annoys me everytime i find the wrong instructions for the wrong version It's been a wonderful system to use. And for each new image we build, we create an answer file for and make sure the copy profile option is enabled, apply it do the WDS image, and it works everytime we deploy an image. Once you get it right, it works beautifully. I can honestly say that the failure rate of images created and deployed, versus images out of Ghost have been significantly different.
I've had ghost images that would just crap out and fail and I would have to rebuild them from scratch It's time consuming, but once you get it right, it works.. My client did something to their comp. All her programs are lists under All Programs. Yet, in an identical system on an identical laptop, there is no "Default user", just the user, and it works fine. Office Office Exchange Server. Not an IT pro?
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We use a default user profile and in the past what we've done is build a profile. Place all of the shortcuts and program changes like CMD with the settings we like etc. Desktop icons etc. We then would create a dummy Administrator and using that user we'd copy the profile we created above over the Default User under the users folder. That way each new user that had a profile created would start with the settings we wanted.
It seems that with Windows 7 RC1 the ability to do that is gone. I noticed the Default User Profile is actually in the Profile window with all of the other users and no matter who we create we cannot Copy over any user to the Default User. How can I change that Default User profile to have the settings etc. Tuesday, May 5, PM. I fixed this easily by re-selecting the correct background pic.
I really hope that MS restores the previous method as this seems very sketchy to me and I'd hate to have to use this in a production environment. Thursday, May 7, PM. But I don't know the differences between the Default and the Default User in that folder - so I'm just speculating.
Wednesday, May 6, AM. I'm testing Win7rc at work; the local school district. I have over pcs to deal with. I have several "Default Profiles" set up in various schools because of printers, network folders, local specific apps, mapped drives, etc.
I like the feel of Windows 7 but after I joined it to our domain, my bubble burst. I can't use this OS without being able to set up student profiles for each school. Short of doing it the way you describe Wayne.
I'm thinking Microsoft should allow modification of their built in "Defaut Profile" to my requirements which would save a lot of time. I would only need to log on as the "Default User" instead of my admin account and set what needs setting and poof, it is done. I also use "delprof" alot at the end of the school year.
Sunday, May 24, PM. There were many issues with it in the prior OSes, even though those issues were not always apparent, they did exist and caused inconsistencies and lingering problems. This article points to the supported way of updating the Default User profile which is the only profile that should be used to for creation of the new user profile. Friday, May 29, PM. Wednesday, June 17, PM. I'm not the brightest bulb in the room but like I said, I"ve used this method for about 10 years now and it works fine.
I've never used sysprep. I would like Microsoft to allow modifications to the default user profile straight out. Thursday, June 18, PM. How about giving this a try: 1. Change the value of the Default key to the location of the custom profile you wish to use as the Default Profile.
You now have two options:- a. Verify that the "Everyone" security group has read permissions throughout the entire profile. That's because the Default Profile is now pointing to that custom profile so you can copy it just like you've been doing for the last 10 years. Finally, go back and change the ProfileList reg key back to the Default. Edited by scarneol Wednesday, September 23, AM. Tuesday, July 14, PM. I will try this tomorrow morning on the first computer I touch.
Thursday, July 16, AM. That's because the Default Profile is now pointing to the custom profile so you can copy it just like you've been doing for the last 10 years. I tried this on Friday and it didn't quite work. It did enable me to mess with the Default User profile from within the System Properties window, but after creating a new local test account I couldn't log in with it. Windows complained about an error in the default profile I can't remember the exact error.
Changing the registry setting back to the original didn't help and I had to reformat the computer. I think that copying the Administrator profile will work if that's what has to be done How is it created? Does someone have a template file with that swtich set? Can I just point at that file with the CopyProfile setting enabled in the Specialize section? Tuesday, July 21, AM. I believe I have a solution. At the end of that step, you have a computer that can be deployed, cloned, or whatever.
Proposed as answer by threeheadedmonkey Wednesday, July 29, PM. Thursday, July 23, AM. I did this on Win7 and it seems to work perfectly. I'll see if this is going to work for me in the schools. Thanks for this info. Saturday, July 25, AM. The Slowest Zombie thx for your solution ist works for me under win7. Wednesday, July 29, PM. I hate to bump this up, but this is the exact problem I'm running into. We are a huge school district and our tech staff is spread very thin. Default profiles are an absolute requirement.
I cannot stress enough how quickly Windows will be dumped if the default profile situation isn't sorted out by the time we upgrade to Windows 7. We caught a deal this summer with a movement of several hundred computers, but ultimately Vista was useless to us due to a lack of time we had to manipulate the profiles to work accordingly.
It's kind of funny how Vista's profiles were changed to be more secure and less corruptable than XP, however, every time I copied a profile in XP, it worked fine But anyway, is there any hope for the default profiles being ironed out? There is a truckload of settings, printers, programs, desktop icons, etc that must be sorted out and individualized.
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